Presently, wireless, or “WIFI”, “hot spots” are used to enable wireless devices such as laptop computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), hand-held computers, etc., to connect to networks such as the Internet. Various known standards for wireless communications, such as IEEE 802.11, Bluetooth, cellular networks, etc., are used for such wireless connectivity. Thus, present systems and methods enable users of wireless devices to connect to wireless routers at various geographic locations, such wireless routers in turn being connected to a network such as the Internet.
However, present systems and methods for connecting wireless devices to a network suffer from a number of shortcomings. First, a particular wireless device may be connected to the Internet or other network only when within the area of coverage of a wireless hot spot. Most wireless hot spots extend for only a few hundred feet. Thus, when the user takes the wireless device outside a particular wireless hot spot's area of coverage, the user loses connectivity to the Internet or other network. Further, present systems require the wireless router to which a wireless device connects to be connected to the Internet via a wired broadband connection, although there are generally significant costs associated with such a broadband Internet connection. Moreover, present users of wireless devices have no way of easily moving from one wireless hot spot to another. Presently, a user wishing to move from one wireless hot spot to another must manually log off the first wireless hot spot, and manually log into, or somehow register with, the second wireless hot spot.
Accordingly, it would be desirable for users of wireless devices to be able to access a wireless network that was not limited to the area of coverage of a single wireless router. Further, it would be advantageous if such a wireless network did not require a wireless device to be connected to a wireless router that was directly connected to the Internet or some other network. Moreover, it would be advantageous for such a wireless network to allow users to seamlessly and transparently, (i.e., automatically from the perspective of the user) move their wireless devices from an area covered by one wireless router to an area covered by a second wireless router.
Further, it is possible that a wireless network could be so large, including so many nodes, that it would not be not efficient to have every router within the network store information about every wireless device within the network. Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a wireless grid that allows a group of routers in the proximity of a wireless device to recognize the wireless device so that the wireless device does not suffer loss of communications, and does not have to initiate a log-in, when moving from one location to another, while at the same time not utilizing memory and other resources in wireless routers outside of the grid.